Philosophy of science

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Philosophy of science

• Philosophers of science

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Early Philosophers

• Plato (428 - 347 B.C.)
• Rationalist
• Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.)
• Empiricist

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Bacon, Francis (1561-1626)

• English philosopher, essayist, and statesman
• 1620 Novum Organum (New Tools)
• Theory of Induction
• Redefined the role of science in society from
  being a hobby for intellectuals, to a tool for
  bettering the life conditions of mankind
• Printing, the compass and gunpowder have changed
  the world, science will lead to many such
  inventions in the future
• Empiricist

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Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

• 1637 Discourse on Method
• Theory of Deduction
• Mechanistic worldview
• Mathematics is the primary form for reality and
  thinking
• Mathematics is the key to knowledge
• Rationalist

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Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642)

• Astronomer/Mathematician, one of the greats of
  modern science
• Galileo's achievements include
• demonstrating that the velocities of falling
  bodies are not proportional to their weights
• showing that the path of a projectile is a
  parabola
• building the first astronomical telescope
• coming up with the ideas behind Newton's laws of
  motion
• confirming the Copernican theory of the solar
  system.
• He was denounced for heretical views by the
  church in Rome, tried by the Inquisition, and
  forced to renounce his belief that the planets
  revolved around the sun.
• Designed the scientific experiment
• http//www.mcm.edu/academic/galileo/ars/arshtml/ma
  thofmotion1.html

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David Hume (1711-1776)

• Scottish enlightenment
• Neither reason nor experience reveals to us the
  truth about the things that traditional
  metaphysics discusses-things such as God, the
  soul or the material substances that supposedly
  cause our sense-perceptions
• Experience has only something to say about the
  past, nothing about the future

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Hume continued

• What is reason? Can we justify a belief about the
  future by reasoning from the past to the future?
• Inductive reasoning is only a habit or custom
• There is no rational bases that correlations in
  the past will continue in the future
• Most of our knowledge has a non-rational
  foundation
• Critical empiricism is the way (the spirit of
  Bacon)

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• Things in themselves according to Kant
• Reaction on Hume
• The world as it appears to us is not reality as
  it is in itself.
• The world in itself is the source of our
  experience.
• The things in themselves are not objects for
  experience.
• Our experience provides the content of our
  sense-perceptions, which our mind renders
  intelligible through the imposition of form.
• Mind does not create the world but it does shape
  it at a very deep level...

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The conflict

• Empiricism - Rationalism
• Aristotle - Plato
• Bacon - Descartes
• Newton?
• Hume - Kant
• Anglo-Saxon - Continental European
• Assignment
• Try to describe some experiment you have done in
  some subject by using the concepts theory,
  hypothesis, empirical, rational, induction,
  deduction

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Assignment

• Try to describe some experiment you have done in
  some subject by using the concepts theory,
  hypothesis, empirical, rational, induction,
  deduction